Muggers targeting the elderly in recent attacks

Muggers appear to be preying on the most vulnerable, attacking and robbing senior citizens in the Bronx and in Brooklyn.

An 82 year old man beaten outside a bodega in the Bronx is the third elderly person to be attacked in the area since September.

It happened just before dawn. An elderly man was walking to the corner store, when he was tripped, and then dragged off the sidewalk. He was beaten and robbed. Moments later, the mugger takes off down the street.

It would take a full five minutes before the victim struggles to his feet and tries to walk, but he's dazed and bleeding badly from his head. He braces himself against the steel gates of a hair salon, and then slowly staggers away to get help.

The victim makes it half-block to the bodega, where he first leans against a cooler, and then finally sits down after the owner offers him a milk crate.

Nouman Saleh says he called 911. According to the store's surveillance video, EMS arrived eleven minutes later. The victim was rushed to Lincoln Hospital, where he would be listed in critical condition.

This attack happened early Wednesday morning, but only the latest of several attacks on elderly New Yorkers. The city's police commissioner said they are becoming all too common.

"We have seen, as I say, in the last few days, attacks on the elderly and obviously we have to be concerned about that. We want people to be on guard, to protect themselves, to do kind of standard things: Don't take your keys out too early, those sorts of things," Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

In yet another attack on an elderly New Yorker, surveillance video captured a man, following an 88-year-old woman into her apartment building in Bedford-Stuyvesant and brutally attacking her. The attacker slipped in behind the victim as she entered her building. He followed her up the stairs and came up behind her as she reached the landing, just steps from her apartment. He knocked her to the ground and stole her purse. The suspect was captured on surveillance video.